The Police Department wants to partner with private companies in the city willing to have security cameras on their property fed to a high-tech video surveillance center being built at police headquarters.

Police Chief Gary J. Gemme said his department does not intend to monitor the video feeds all the time. Instead, he said, the video will be accessed only in instances of a shooting, robbery or other serious crime.

“If there is an incident going on, if there is an armed robbery in progress or if we get information as part of our investigations that a crime is going to be committed in a certain area, we will be able tap into the video cameras that already exist at that location,” the chief said.

He emphasized that the police surveillance center, known as the Real Time Crime Center, will not have any capabilities to store video surveillance data.

“We don't plan on installing new cameras as part of this system and we don't have a system in place where we're going to set up cameras throughout the city that we're going to monitor from this location,” Chief Gemme told the City Council Public Safety Committee last night.

“The Real Time Crime Center simply gives us the ability to look at what's out there, using existing cameras, very quickly for investigative purposes. It has no storage capabilities, so it's not a question of retaining data or monitoring multiple cameras around the clock to see what's going on in the city. To monitor all the cameras throughout the city, we'd probably need more than 1,000 monitors. This center will not be manned 24/7.”

Chief Gemme said the Police Department has spent about $68,000 of the $75,000 state grant to create the Real Time Crime Center.

He said the video surveillance hub will be able to access video feeds from the cameras of private entities throughout the city. But to be able to do so, he said, the department first has to sign memorandums of understanding with each property owner.

“If we have a shooting or a homicide, we can immediately go into the Real Time Crime Center, (turn on) the existing cameras and take a look at the video to see if there is some information we can get out quickly to our officers as well as to the public," he added. “At that location, we're not going to access any information that we couldn't access by knocking on doors or canvassing neighborhoods, which is labor intensive.”

Chief Gemme said police routinely use video from private surveillance cameras as part of their investigations. He said when there is an incident, police canvass the neighborhood to see if they can identify surveillance cameras that may be in place in that area.

“We do that on a regular basis and it's been instrumental in solving a lot of serious crimes in the city,” he said.

The chief said when police identify a suspect or if there is information they need from what we've seen in the Real Time Crime Center, they will still have to go to the owner of the surveillance system to retrieve that videos on it can be used as evidence in a criminal case.

He said that will need to be done because the Real Time Crime Center will not have any storage capacity within its system. Even if it did, he said, it wouldn't be practical to try and retrieve it once it was in the system because there would be no way of cataloguing it.

Brian D. Halloran, president of the police patrolmen's union, spoke in favor of the Real Time Crime Center, saying it will be an invaluable tool in assisting police to do their job and, in the process, could help save lives as well.

“It's absolutely 100 percent the right thing to be doing and we back it,” Officer Halloran said. “Having access to this kind of system will put officer safety paramount to everything else.”

Members of the Public Safety Committee also supported the concept, saying the chief's presentation debunks the notion that “Big Brother” will be watching all the time.

“People's perception and imagination have run wild with this since it was announced,” said District 5 Councilor William J. Eddy, committee chairman. “This should dispel some of the rumblings going on out there. This is an excellent use of police resources.”